by Jerry eBooks
“Ten-seventeen peeyem, Trooper Ames calling from Port Henry fower two, One-Eyed Jack’s,”—hey, that sounds like a wild joint, Demon—“escorting to Cee Point green ’47 Buick sedan Maryland VR 21 dash 744, owner Catherine—oh, K as in Kokomo, huh?—Caudle, Baltimore, EmDee, driving, for investigation Wistor case. No one else in car. Right?”
“Think so, Russ.” If there was anyone else in the car, he’d know pretty quick! “Anything on that Comstock break?”
“Yair. Medini was reported driving a ’40 or ’41 Ford station wagon through Mechanicville toward Albany, ten minutes ago. Guess he figured the northern routes were too hot.”
“Must have.” Medini—sixty miles south, ten minutes ago! That was that. So much for garlic! “I’ll call in from the Point, Russ.” He hung up.
He’d have to go easy with the girl, now. Wasn’t a thing to connect her with Brad’s murder.
She’d come the route she told him she meant to. She’d even followed his advice about the chains. And if there had been anything—or anyone—in that trunk compartment, would she go into the cafe and leave the car like this?
As far as that slowing down before she hit the roadblock, and afterwards, anyone might do that in weather that was only fit for a walrus. She’d said she believed in playing it safe.
HE WENT in the cafe. She perched on a stool at the lunch counter, nylons neatly crossed. When he took the adjoining seat, she recognized him, smiled.
“The nice cop.” Then she frowned. “Say, you hurt yourself!”
“My girl scratched me.” He watched her carefully—no sign of alarm at all. “She plays rough sometimes.”
“Anybody’d think—” she laughed at him over the rim of a thick, white mug—“you were following me.”
“I was.” He ordered Old Black Joe. “Should I be flattered? Or frightened?”
“They just want to ask you some questions back at Crown Point.”
She set her cup down slowly. “Who does?”
“Police.”
“What about?” She began to be indignant.
“A murder.”
The hamburger she’d started to bite remained suspended an inch from her lips—her mouth stayed open. “I don’t understand! Are you arresting me? What for? What happened?”
“Guy got shot down there tonight.” The garlic hadn’t been on her breath, in that was one sure thing. She smelled nice and kind of exciting. “Little while before you drove past my post. They want to find out if you saw anybody who might have done it.”
“For Pete’s sake! How would I know who did it! I don’t even know who was killed!”
“They’ll tell you all about it.” He stirred sugar in his black coffee. “You stop in Crown Point at all?”
“Not even for a traffic light. No. Not until you stopped me.”
“Happen to notice a little grocery store couple miles the other side of town? Wistor’s?”
“No, I didn’t. And I don’t see why I have to—”
“Orders, that’s why. Hope you don’t mind driving back.”
“Certainly I mind. I mind plenty!”
“Sorry. You’ll come back, anyway.” She banged the hamburger on her plate, exasperated. “I don’t even know if there’s a decent hotel in Crown Point where I can stay.”
“They’ll find a place for you somewhere.” He left it at that, laid a quarter on the counter. “Take your time. I’ll be out at the car.”
“Imagine! Wouldn’t this happen to me!” She eyed him with a mixture of derision and incredulity.
When she came out he was bending over the trunk compartment of the Buick which had been backed out onto the apron, a few feet outside the garage door. The odor of garlic, he decided, had its source in or near that rear end.
“I have to pay the man for the chains.” She strode angrily into the garage office, settled her bill.
The garageman switched off the light, followed her out curiously. “Take it easy on the bare cement, miss.”
“Thanks.” She was curt. “I won’t be able to help myself.”
The man in the mackinaw locked the door, went away. The girl tilted her chin up at the Demon.
“You want to drive, officer?”
“Uh, uh. You go ahead. I’ll follow.” The Demon waited until she climbed in back of the wheel. “Let me have your keys.”
“Whatfor?” That queer, panicky tone in her voice again.
“Check your trunk compartment.” He held out his hand.
“I’ll open it for you.” She unlatched the door, tense, wary.
He shook his head. She gave him the keys. He closed the door again, went around back.
She watched him in the rear-view.
He used his left hand to manipulate the keys. The right fist went to his holster, came back loaded.
He got the lock open, swung up the lid.
A tarpaulin covered something bulky. He reached out, jerked at the canvas.
As he bent forward he caught the merest glimpse of a glitter on the chrome of the rear bumper beside his knees.
That wasn’t all he caught.
His fur cap broke the blow. The force of it knocked him into the trunk compartment. He wrenched around, tried to bring his gun up. The glittering weapon smashed at his wrist. His fingers went numb. The .45 clattered against the bumper.
“Help!” The Demon half-rolled, half-slid to his knees, scrabbling in the slush for the automatic. The man above him clubbed him across the mouth.
The Demon kicked at trouser-clad shins, twisted toward his motorcycle. As he slithered sideways he had a good clear view of dark eyes blazing ferocity in a narrow, olive-skinned face, small lips drawn back wolfishly beneath a long nose. “Help . . . Help!”
The door of the cafe banged open. Voices calling. A scurry of feet.
The Buick roared, began to back.
“Come on!” screamed the girl.
Medini snatched at the .45: The car backed over it, kept him from grabbing the automatic. “Fix this cop, first.” He lifted a nickel-plated hammerless, took careful aim.
The Demon scrunched behind Minnie’s rear wheel. Livid flame spat at him. Metal rang loudly. Pain lanced at the side of his neck.
Medini swung on the running-board, snarling commands:
“Run over him! Run him down! Smash that machine!”
The Demon dived, slid on his face, clawed at the .45.
THE Buick had stopped, started forward, toward him. He propped himself on his elbow, fired at the windshield. A cobweb of shattered glass spread out in front of the girl.
She swerved the Buick away, into the road. From the running-board, Medini’s revolver barked twice more, like a threatening puppy, before the sedan sped out of range.
The Demon was straddling Minnie by the time a short-order cook in a stained apron and a stout man in a leather jacket reached him.
“That’s Medini!” Escaped con!” He had no seconds to waste on explanations. “Call state police!” Minnie responded to the spark. He zoomed onto the highway.
It was rough going. His right wrist had no feeling in it at all. Might be a bone busted, he thought. He had to hold the .45 in his left. Minnie would have to take the bit in her teeth, practically steer herself.
“Saved my life, ole gal,” he muttered, leaning his elbows on the handlebars. “If you hadn’t deflected that pill, I’d be a sick boy right about now.”
The Buick’s tail-lights vanished over a crest. They might stop, over the hill, ambush him. Had to risk that. Probably wouldn’t, wanting to get away from the hue and cry.
He fed Minnie power. She shivered, wobbled, when the speed indicator topped fifty.
“Cry sake,” he grumbled. “Hit your fork, did he, Minnie?! Threw your sprockets out of kilter!” He held her at fifty.
When he topped the rise, there were no purplish tail-lights in sight. They couldn’t have gained that much, could they?
They hadn’t. At the foot of the hill, a wood road opened out. Headlights emerged from
it, swung toward him, coming fast.
He flicked on his blinker, threw the siren on. The oncoming car stuck to the middle of the road. Then he knew.
They’d run him down. Head-on smack-up. Wouldn’t damage the Buick too much to travel. But for the Demon to hit a car at this speed would be like jumping out a ten-story building and landing on the pavement.
He waited until the headlights were twenty feet away, heading way over on the wrong side of the road, pinning him. Then he flung himself to the left, let Minnie ride on her crash bar into the ditch.
The Buick lurched toward him, too late. The girl had to fight the wheel to keep the sedan on the road. The Demon crawled out of an icy puddle, rubbed the skid burns on his left hip, cursing futilely. He hauled Minnie back to the road, remounted, gave her the ethyl.
They’d come about three miles from One-Eyed Jack’s; on the back track the Demon met only one pursuing car, a Mercury, driven by the man in the leather jacket. The Demon didn’t even bother to wave him around; the Buick was out of sight again.
The Demon poured it on, whizzed past the neon-lit road-house with Minnie clattering like a Model T on a corduroy road.
“Old gray mare—ain’t what she used t’be,” he mumbled, through swollen lips. “Just hold together another ten, that’s all I ask, Minnie. Then I’ll turn you out t’ pasture.”
At the turn where he’d spotted the wet sign he saw the tail-lights again. Disappearing west, toward Placid.
He began to gain. Another half-mile. A yellow pencil of flame pointed at him from the right hand window. He couldn’t hear the shot.
He waited another minute before he rested the barrel of the .45 on the windshield and fired at the gas tank. He emptied the clip into the back of the car at tank level. Maybe there were sharpshooters who could hit a tire at sixty mph. But not the Demon. Not with his left hand—riding a bronc that shivered like one of those barber’s massage gadgets.
He could have passed the Buick then. But he dropped into third, watched the iridescent film widening on the smooth satin of ice beneath his headlamp.
Minnie’s affliction became suddenly aggravated. Her front wheel slewed wildly. He slowed to forty. The motorcycle threatened to shiver itself apart. He cut to thirty, to twenty-five, before he could handle her.
The tail-lights began to narrow together, draw away into the darkness of a long upgrade. At a bend, they blacked out momentarily. He didn’t dare push Minnie too hard but in a quarter-mile, he caught sight of them again.
If he hadn’t drilled those punctures low enough in the gas tank, they might still have enough fuel to escape. He kept his siren going full blast to inform any late wayfarer which way the chase was going.
The Buick hit the crest of the big hill a full mile ahead. When he got to the peak, he saw the loom of the headlights far below. They were swerving, turning. Maybe they meant to make another stab at crashing into him.
No! The car was in a skid. A long, sweeping slide. The gas had been used up. The motor’d died. They hadn’t had power to use on the curve.
He was a hundred yards behind when the headlights dipped, somersaulted, lunged off into the darkness of the pine woods, came to rest, pointing up into the night from a deep gully.
He slurred Minnie around in the middle of the highway, kicked down the stand, left her chuttering softly with her blinker light still going. That would halt any passing traffic and tip off any of the troop cars that might be answering a phone from One-Eyed Jack’s.
He plunged off into the soft, wet mulch of leaves and spruce needles—flashlight in his right hand, .45 in the fist he could depend on.
The Buick lay on its side, far below on the steep slope—the broken ice of a brook wriggling alongside it like a spotted snake. The Demon could see no sign of movement.
But after fifty yards of scratching his eyes out on thorny scrub and barking his shins on ice-coated boulders, he saw something that looked like a raveling of red yarn on the ice. It was above the car; it couldn’t have dripped from the Buick.
Someone had been hurt, had managed to get out. It wasn’t the girl. He could make out her blond curls tangled with the wheel where she lay slumped over, clamped in the wreckage.
The Demon kept rigidly quiet, heard nothing. He went on twenty steps, stopped again. There was no sound other than the whining of the wind in the evergreens, the lashing of sleet against branches. But through the aromatic pungency of the pines—the clean, fresh fragrance of the spruce—he caught the unmistakable odor of garlic.
MEDINI was coming toward him!
Heading straight for the road—with the idea of kidnaping Minnie and riding her out of the danger zone!
The Demon knelt in the slime of sleety leaves and twigs and needles. The smell became stronger. He thumbed on the flashlight switch, threw the plastic tube down the slope. The cone of light turned and twisted like a landing beacon gone crazy.
The brusque bark of the .32 answered, but the Demon was dazzled by his own pyrotechnics. He couldn’t see the finger of flame to shoot back.
The flashlight bounced off a tree, caromed onto a rock, slid a few feet, came to rest on its side—the beam half pointing toward the Demon!
A tapering evergreen, silhouetted against the luminous blur, became suddenly thinner at its base. A shadow; like that of a misshapen boulder, detached itself from the trunk.
The Demon held his automatic with both hands, sighted, fired.
The answering snarl was that of a wounded animal. The Demon crawled toward the sound. He couldn’t see Medini. But there was no difficulty about smelling him.
The .45 held stiffly before him, the Demon inched nearer. The man might be playing ‘possum.
Medini coughed—a harsh, strangling cough. “I told Katie—I should’ve taken time—to punch your ticket—back there at the joint—”
The Demon shoved the automatic against the killer’s ribs, reached for the hammerless. The stench of garlic seemed overpowering. It didn’t come from the man’s breath. It was on the gun. It had been on Medini’s right hand.
“How was it?” The Demon felt the soggy spot at the breast pocket of the coat the murderer wore. “Did Brad Wistor have a handful of garlic when you jumped him? Grab your gun? When you shot him? That how it went?”
“The hat,” the dying man said painfully. “The hat Katie brought me—too big.” He struggled to sit up, succeeded only in rolling to his side. “Tried to grab a hat from that runty grocer. He put up a battle—had to give it—to him.”
“How’d you get by the road-block, Medini?”
“Hid—trunk compartment. Lifted lid—jumped out. Got back in other side.” He coughed again, weakly. “Get me—to a doc!”
“And leave your girl, like that?”
“She’s gone,” Medini gasped.
You won’t be far behind her, the Demon thought. But he said: “We’ll do what we can for you—Minnie and I.”
But by the time he’d checked on the girl to make sure she was beyond help, and had lugged Medini up to the highway, a patrol coupe came screaming in from the south.
Cap Matthews got out, cradling a submachine gun in his left elbow. Two other troopers piled down the hill to the sedan.
The Demon had his say.
When he’d done, the Captain grunted approval. “Not bad, for a one-man job. Not bad.” He regarded the Demon critically. “We’ll take the bodies in. You look a little blue around the gills. Better stop in somewhere and have something good and hot. There’s a nice spaghetti joint, couple miles south.”
“Not for me:” The Demon shook his head. “I’ve had all the garlic I can take, for one day.”
STILL OF THE NIGHT
Will Oursler
“Only the two of us, sitting here in the silence . . .”
IT IS quiet now. The quivering hush of country twilight. Here on the porch, I jot down these notes by the light streaking through the window from inside the house.
There are only the two of us, alone in this lodge of mine
, this retreat from the sounds of the city, from the world of hurrying people and grinding machines. Only the two of us, sitting here in silence, each lost in his own small thoughts, his own trivial terror.
It is strange I should have had a love affair. The young scientist, I was, devoted to my research in the laboratory at Columbia. Romance had no part in my plans. There was no time.
I should have known, I suppose. Elemental force is always mathematically stronger than the individual struggling against it.
It was so natural—almost inevitable—my meeting with Iris, Dr. Haley’s young and lovely wife. I knew that, of course. We were working together, Haley and I, on my latest experiment. He had asked me to supper, to dine with them.
A tall, ponderous man, Dr. Haley. By the thinning, grayish mop of hair, the drawn lines of his face I put him in his sixties at least. She was in her early thirties.
“Iris,” Haley was saying, “here’s Bob Thorne. You’ve heard me speak of him.”
I had never seen anyone quite like her, anyone so close to the essence of femininity. A Dresden doll which by some miracle of science had been given the spark of life and blood in its porcelain veins.
I scarcely heard Haley as he made the introductions. I was looking at her, drinking in loveliness, the spell of innocent blue eyes with their secret, wordless search for excitement.
It was insanity, I admit. Yet it seemed we both knew. It seemed she had to know, as well as I.
I watched her that evening in the candlelight of the dining room. There were other guests, faculty members and their wives. I was pleased she gave me the place of honor at her right.
SHE was the perfect hostess, with her easy flow of casual chit-chat.
“Yes, my dear, we saw the Silver Bell only the other night. Splendid. Except Dorothy Hammond does overplay, don’t you think? . . . Have you seen it, Mrs. Whiting? I’m sure you’d enjoy—”
Yet there was something in her tone, even in these meaningless words of polite conversation. I said little during that dinner. My eyes hardly left her. Except for one brief, searching glance, she gave no sign that she realized.
